GxG 1
Finding out I have a superpower is exhilarating. The mote feels too distinct to be a hallucination and combined with my recent rebirth makes it kind of obvious that it is not natural.
The sheer elation of knowing I might be something in this life caused me to gurgle out a very joyful squeal. The kind of baby laugh the would do numbers as a stock sound effect. The kind of baby laugh that causes every woman within 100 meters to come down with acute baby fever.
My mother must not have been near my room because I saw the baby monitor on the shelf near my crib blink on for a moment, but I guess when she saw I wasn't crying it turned off again.
Taking a moment to steady myself and figure out what that mote actually meant, I hope I never make that sound again.
I was a mature man baby, dammit.
Without further time wasting, I turned my attention back to the mote, Meditation.
[LINE BREAK]
After prodding the mote in my mind for a while, I came to several conclusions about this ability I seem to have found myself with.
The first is that mote represents training, in this case training my ability in meditation. About 8 hours of training worth a day, based on the feelings I got while poking around.
The second is that I have a LOT of control over what that training actually means. I have fine control over if I wanted not to train, train myself to the human apex of the ability, to train beyond human or anything in between. This means if I ever pick up a mote I don't want to train because of its visual effects or something similar, I can just not train it.
Here's where my ability gets conceptual. See just 8 hours of free training wasn't enough, there's this feeling of infinity woven into it. That I'll grow forever, in whatever way I want. That explicitly means that I can train positive traits into myself as if I had been born with them and I can train negative traits out of abilities, even if it doesn't make sense scientifically.
I could train myself to breathe underwater or train away the need to eat, the possibilities are endless.
What this means for Meditation is that I can spend the training time getting an overall improvement in my skill, or I could focus on certain parts for more targeted improvement.
I could focus on how fast I can enter a meditative state. I could focus on how deep into meditation I can get. I could focus on training my ability to be aware of my surroundings while meditating.
I could even train my ability to meditate while moving around and doing other things, but that felt like it wasn't efficient. Like my base stats were too low to do something like that. Aware meditation isn't something that can run on baby wetware it seems.
I could force it, but it will be slower to train than if I had just spent time growing and then trained it.
Third is that I'll never get worse. Part of conceptual training is that I can only go forward. While I can pause training, I can never get worse at anything I do.
An important caveat is that the 8 hours to training is a conceptual 8 hours, not a human 8 hours. What this means is for example is I was training weightlifting. A human would have to spend time resting in between sets, wasting time switching between weights and machines and other things that humans do.
My ability is the equivalent of 8 hours straight of pumping iron with perfect form, which is insane.
The catch is that any training I do is based on my current status. That means as a baby any mental skills are trained based on my baby brain modifier, and physical skills are based on my baby body. I could train myself into super baby, able to leap a building in a single bound, to get around this limitation, but I won't. I'm going to limit myself to peak human to avoid government labs until I know more about where I am.
[LINE BREAK]
After that period of discovery and learning, I had found my path. I was just a baby now, but I knew my future.
I wanted a foundation so deep and so wide that every Xianxia protagonist will weep with jealousy.
I wanted to be in fight with someone and use grandmaster physicist skills to calculate the trajectory of my foot to their ass.
I wanted to be the man of a million skills.
And like every Xianxia protagonist, I had to start with the basics.